by Jim Harrison
Ruth had decided not to marry her grocer, making the decision on the flight up from Tucson. We were walking down the main street of Saint Helena when she told me this; we had paused before a shopwindow that distorted our images in the manner of a funhouse mirror. While we talked we waved, mugged, flapped, and moved to change our reflections. Sleeping with the grocer wasn’t erotic like sleeping with the “dipshit” priest who continued writing from Costa Rica. She had recently reread Emily Dickinson, which had reminded her to take another look at Emily Brontë. What was the point of marrying if her soul wasn’t stirred? I wasn’t much help because the question made me think of Duane. I was wet from the creek and he was hot and dry, the almost spoiled fruit smell of the wild-plum wine sour on his breath, dirt and twigs sticking to us, the small circle of light in my eyes from the top of the tipi. I didn’t think I went in that far. I returned to earth when a courtly old gentleman stopped on the street and asked us if we were sisters. Ruth smiled, and nodded yes. He did a Chaplin glance up and down the street, saying “Where are the lucky fellows?” Then did a little dance step as he walked away. I felt suddenly sad for I wanted more of this attitude in life. I teased Ruth about her girlhood crush on Robert Ryan. She brought me up short when she said she had loved Robert Ryan because she somehow imagined he acted like the father she was too young to remember.
The finale was a meal in Yountville at Mustard’s where Michael ordered all ten entrees for the five of us. He was a little manic but Mother was happy from a day of wine-tasting and bird-watching, so it was hard to be cross with him. It was a place favored by locals, and a number of people from the wineries waved or nodded at Naomi and Michael. He seemed to know a good deal about wine but he doubtless also could pass himself off as an astrophysicist. I was unnerved by the sight of an older man from Pacific Palisades in the far corner of the restaurant. He was renowned for his sexual cruelty to women in the film colony. I found myself wondering how there could still be pathology when pathology had begun to approach the norm.
The change of mood followed me back to Santa Monica the next afternoon. I began to regret what training I had had in psychiatric social work. Enthusiasms can stretch one into remote corners, from comparative literature (three-day-old bread), to game biology (biometric fatuities), the Peace Corps (kindness regimented into banality), to social work (torn anuses, and the very real boot heel of the late twentieth century grinding the bottom ten percent into very real dust). In short, I was ready for Nebraska.
When I reached the parking garage under my apartment building from the airport there was a quarrel in process between a professional football player who lived in the building and two women. Someone had swiped his cocaine. The building superintendent was watching and greeted me with a wink and a shrug. There was another man waxing his car and ignoring the fuss. In the elevator it occurred to me that every man, woman, and dog in America was tethered on too short a lead or chain, and that’s how they begin the training of guard dogs—a three-foot lead to an iron post and the dog was permanently pissed off within a few weeks.
About an hour later, just before Andrew called, I remembered I had seen a movement in the far corner of the garage beyond my immediate attention span. Andrew was calling from the basement asking me to come right down and sign a complaint against Guillermo Sandoval to add to a dozen others. How could this be? I thought. It’s not even dark yet.
The police were the same two who had handled the original problem with the boy and greeted me by name. “We got the fucker,” they said. Andrew was talking to the man who had been waxing a car. He turned out to be the bodyguard Ted had hired. The two women had disappeared and the football player and the building superintendent were eagerly talking to a reporter. A TV mobile unit swerved up to the garage entrance, then stopped and checked for clearance. I noticed the bodyguard’s shirt was torn in one place and he had a handkerchief wrapped around a hand with some blood coming through it. Sandoval was handcuffed to an iron support pole, and leaning against a car fender; the healed scars gave his face a rumpled look. We looked at each other long and hard and I refused to avert my glance. Not very deep in my heart I admitted I could have shot him like a rabid dog. What had happened is the two women in the cocaine quarrel had begun screaming and Sandoval, fearing a problem he hadn’t bargained for, slipped from his hiding place and had been seen by the bodyguard. The bodyguard couldn’t subdue Sandoval by himself, in fact was losing the struggle, when the football player in a fit of rage over his lost cocaine decided to help. Meanwhile the building super notified the police and the relieved bodyguard called Andrew. I was a bit numb from it all and was unwittingly shown in the late TV news, and morning newspapers, as the damsel in distress saved by the linebacker. All the other details were neglected. Around such violence there is always a smell in the air like tire smoke. Sandoval was carrying a sharpened car aerial, a piece of rope, and a .38 Ruger. Among this evidence the rope disturbed me the most.
Two hours later, after a half-dozen drinks, a lot of trembling, and some stories, I was in bed with Andrew. We decided not to feel bad about it because we had been thinking about making love for several years. Except we felt a little bit bad anyway. It was far beyond talk and any immediate effort to clear up the situation, as people say. Instead, we decided to feel merely compromised and made a late dinner out of my freezer, an assortment of recipes my uncle Paul had taught me in Mexico. Violence, sex, food, death. I showed Andrew a letter from a social-worker friend who had moved to Detroit. Her first assignment was to counsel the children of two men whose heads had been cut off in a dope execution. She said she had never had to handle a dismemberment case before.
Curiously, I didn’t feel bleak at dawn. I’ve always had a rather masculine, perhaps naïve, sense of recovery—so many men believe a morning can mean a fresh start, while women suspect a night’s sleep scarcely changes the terms of life. With Andrew it was only a matter of comfort; adult lovers can pretend nothing has really happened because it hasn’t. There is an obvious trace of melancholy in this freedom.
I took my habitual beach walk, the pleasure of which was tempered by the city crews cleaning up the detritus of the first big summer weekend. I gave up and climbed the embankment stairs, heading east on San Vincente. I smiled, remembering Naomi’s first visit years before. Armed with George Hasting’s Trees of Santa Monica she attacked the hundreds of botanical introductions as if she were Rommel invading North Africa. It was a two-week campaign with a city map on my living-room wall streaked with multicolored crayon marks. Many mornings I hiked along with her, though somewhat inattentive to the details she found fascinating. “My God, a yellow oleander from the dogbane family, Thevetia peruviana, native to Mexico, Central and South America, the West Indies, and it’s right here in front of us.” I suppose I’m a romantic and the sight of a specific bird or tree reminds me of the other times I’ve seen the bird or tree, and there’s no urge, despite my training in the area, to run to a book for a name.
I spent the afternoon with the movers and had an early farewell dinner with Ted and Andrew. I had seen them at the most once a month but leavetaking proved difficult for all of us. It was as if precise language was just beyond our reach and the clumsiness wasn’t obvious enough to be humorous. Andrew was uncommonly moody and drank too much, baking a fish too long for the first time ever. His eyes were moist as he dumped it into the trash. Ted gulped his drink as we watched a big dog chase a little one down the beach, tumbling the smaller animal repeatedly in the surf. He became sullen and wanted Andrew to shoot the larger dog. At first he was happy that Ruth had given up the idea of the grocer, then became morose over his lack of family. His son had decided not to visit the coming summer. During his third consecutive drink he tried to pin me down on a possible date for a return visit, and my inability to give him one hurt his feelings. It was still well before dark when we simply gave up, hugged each other, and said goodbye.
I left an hour before daylight, getting on U.S. 10 in the middle of Santa Monic
a—if you cared to you could drive straight through to Jacksonville, Florida, on this same highway, but I got off in Indio and took 86 down to U.S. 8. I had driven home in three days when in a hurry but this time I was giving myself a week to ten days or more if I chose. There was also the barely admissible thought that I wouldn’t pass this way again, that the vertigo of leaving L. A. was mostly that of relief. I numbered the things, the people, and the locations that I would miss but none of them tugged at the heart as much as the trees and most of all, the Pacific, which I had listened to so many days and nights that I often thought we could speak a common language: perhaps a verbless language just short of madness, a sound of flowing blood and water, but nevertheless a language.
By early evening I had reached the dirt road a dozen miles short of Ajo, Arizona, that was my immediate destination. I turned off back west into the desert toward the mountains for a dozen miles, downshifting into four-wheel drive in the loose sand. The road disappeared and I turned up a dry wash at the bottom of an arroyo, parked under a paloverde tree. I stood for a moment in the nearly absolute silence, the car engine ticking away its heat, then covered the car with a lightweight camouflage tarp, a promise of concealment to the two men who had introduced me to the area. I didn’t feel silly at this paramilitary gesture, only thankful that the enormous bare spot on the map that I faced was still reasonably intact in 1986. I took out my summer sleeping bag and a gallon canteen of water, then leaned against the car and put on my hiking boots.
I still had over an hour of light when I set off up the wash toward the Growler Mountains. It was a twenty-minute walk to where we had cached a collapsible army cot years before, in deference to my waking up one morning with a rattlesnake nestled on my sleeping bag. One of the men thought this was very funny but that same evening he had been bitten in the calf by a sidewinder while gathering firewood. Luckily the snake hadn’t injected any venom—not an uncommon thing. I pulled a fang out of his calf with tweezers and we had a few unpleasant hours waiting to see if an emergency move was going to be necessary.
I found the cot inside a cairn we had built, set up my simple camp, and went to gather some firewood. The air had finally begun to cool, and the trickle of sweat between my breasts dried into an itch. I wandered carefully among the cholla, octillo, the bright-green agave from which tequila is made, and the greasewood, picking up ironwood sticks for my fire.
Back at my camp I stacked the wood, then took off all my clothes and sat on the cot naked to watch the dark descend over the mountains. The Cabeza Prieta, a huge area just above the Arizona-Mexico border, doubles as a wildlife refuge and an Air Force gunnery range, which must certainly send a double message to desert creatures. I had given up trying to worry about such matters. Not a mile from the cot we had discovered a footpath over a thousand years old littered occasionally with shards of pottery from ancient water jars, and the brighter glint of seashells. The Hohokam Indians, a tribe that had disappeared a thousand years ago, used the path to travel south from the Gila River to the Sea of Cortez to gather seashells for jewelry. What was it called before the Sea of Cortez? Cortez was a latecomer like ourselves. I could see them walking in a file through the desert in the moonlight when it was cooler, down to the sea to camp and gather shells. Now the darkness did not seem to descend but swept slowly up the mountains as if the dark came out of the earth herself. I felt the slightest tremor of fear hearing the first call of the elf owl, who lives in the holes it burrows into the saguaro cactus. I had camped here several times before and each time this tremor had arrived when I sensed the vast foreignness of the landscape. I had never seen anyone here before. The assortment that was me was totally alone, except for the desert, a slip of moon, and the summer constellations slowly emerging above me.
I had all night to watch the stars so I got off the cot to light the fire. A scorpion, a less friendly relative of the shrimp, skittered away from the flame. I stopped short of saying hello to him, or to the coyote I heard miles away south of me. I was hungry but never ate when I slept here, wanting to stay awake as long as possible to look at the stars. Uncle Paul had introduced me to the two men who first brought me here. I looked upward from the gathering fire and thought of a line in an essay by Lorca, “the enormous night straining her waist against the Milky Way.” I looked down at my body, my arms and belly and thighs turned golden by the fire. I liked living a great deal but there was nothing in me that regretted growing older. I lay back down on the cot in a state of intense physical excitement for reasons I couldn’t understand. I felt an almost imperceptible breeze touch my feet and move up my body. It was my incapacity to admit what laying there on a June night at that latitude would cause—the curious way our emotions withhold information from us.
It was the first of June in 1972 when Naomi called me in New York where I worked as an assistant to a ragtag film documentarian who was obsessed with the poor. We worked and lived together, along with an English sound man, making cinéma-vérité short films for Public Broadcasting. The afternoon Naomi called we were packing the van for a trip to West Virginia for some footage on a coal-mine strike. “I looked at this postcard for two days without calling,” she said. “It’s from Duane in the Florida Keys and says for you to come down quick, I don’t feel too good.” She added a phone number and the fact that I would be in her prayers. I called the number but there was no answer. I called Delta, made a reservation, and packed an overnight bag. I tried to explain myself to the director and lover but was summarily fired from an affair and a job.
I reached Key West before midnight, rented a car, and drove to a motel recommended by a Cuban girl on the plane who wore lots of jewelry. No one at the number had answered at either La Guardia or the Miami airport. The air smelled like dead fish and rotten fruit and even at that late hour was sodden with humidity. Oddly, the airport bar doubled as a strip club and through the open door I could see a girl grabbing her ankles and bending over as far as possible. This was 1972, well before Key West cleaned itself up and became a tourist mecca.
At the motel I drove the desk operator crazy by calling the number every ten minutes for the next hour and a half. Finally he suggested that I direct-dial from the bar. It was the Pier House bar, crowded and nightmarish with what I thought was a convention. There were at least two dozen men and women around my age, thirty, who wore blue shirts that had “Club Mandible” printed on them. They were getting quite drunk and some of them were smoking huge marijuana cigarettes out on the patio. I bought a drink and stood outside in the hall by the pay phone, watching the activity in the bar. It reminded me of some sort of party in a private insane asylum. Then a woman answered the phone. Her name was Grace Pindar and she sounded black. Yes, Duane expected me, and no he wasn’t there, he was out fishing until at least noon tomorrow. How can he fish at night? That’s when they catch the fish, she said. Duane and Grace’s husband were commercial fishermen. Bobby was the captain and Duane was the mate. She gave me directions to where they lived on Big Pine Key.
Now I was trembling and walked out the door, across the patio beside the pool, and down to the water. A slight breeze had come up and the palm fronds were rattling. Two burly men were standing in the water in their clothes flycasting to tarpon that were rolling under a light attached to a dock. One of the men screamed “Holy shit” as he hooked a huge tarpon, which jumped in the dark several times before it broke off. He waded back to the beach where I was standing and tied on another fly. “You want to have some fun?” he asked. He had a big twisted nose but a kind face. Now the other fisherman, with one eye and a brown moonface, waded toward me and I felt a decided urge to go to my room. I asked them where Big Pine Key was and they offered to drive me there. I got the directions, thanked them, and went to my room. I must have awakened and fallen back to sleep a hundred times that night, listening to the wind rattle the palm fronds, the party noise of people jumping in the pool, the slurred shouts that the humidity and walls softened until all the words and dreams in the world became roun
d.
I know in my heart there was nothing that I could have done for him. In the fourteen years since I had seen or heard from him he had punished himself and had been punished, as much as any human could and still be alive. There was the question of to what degree, and in what parts of his soul and body he was still alive: I can see the house and clearing and trailer in a bare pine grove with dead stacked brush, a salt-water channel, and a pool hedged by mangroves. There was no one there I thought but a dog who became friendly, the house no more than a shack with the TV on but no one around. Gray chickens and three piglets in a pen. I went down to the tidal creek and there in a corral in the pines was the buckskin, and I jumped and the dog barked at me. I thought a ghost horse, but he was sixteen, not all that old for a horse but missing a hind hoof up to the pastern. I slid through the corral bars and looked. It was healed, a nubbin hide-covered, the horse sun-bleached but looked well brushed. The tidal creek was full and moving as a small river and there were egrets. A voice said, “He want a swim, that’s all he want to do is swim.” Grace was brown-black, Bahamian. They’ll be home soon. She took me to Duane’s old Airstream trailer which was implausibly neat inside, with dozens of bottles of prescription medicine and pictures on the wall of me; his mother, Rachel; and an old one of Grandfather on a horse. Your pretty Duane is good with ladies but now he’s sick, you could take him to a good hospital not the VA hospital. Grace was hard to understand. We heard the boat coming up the creek. I ran down and Bobby Pindar who was about forty but you couldn’t tell really yelled for Grace who caught the lines and tied off to the dock. Duane got up from where he was lying down on the cooler covered with canvas, shirtless, and I could see holes, indentations in him, also in his cheek and neck because they were whiter than his skin. Scar tissue doesn’t tan well. He hugged me, smelling like sun, fish, and salt. I got you down here because I want you to have my benefits. They said I’m dying. Rachel said you had to give the kid away. Maybe you can find him and give him some of my benefits from the army. They unloaded the fish with Duane telling me the names of different fish. I couldn’t quite talk. He hugged me again and I started to cry but he told me to stop. We’re getting married so you can have my service benefits he said shaking from sickness. Grace set up a table in a grove of trees near the creek and started a fire. Bobby Pindar carried a tub of ice filled with beer. Grace had a bottle of rum, a bottle of hot peppers, Cuban bread, and the chickens she was going to cook. Duane got the buckskin who was excited. Bobby said that horse is the champion swimming horse of the world and should be on TV. Duane got on with just a halter and the horse jumped off the dock. Duane gave a big rodeo hoot and the horse swam up the tidal creek into the mangroves, then back to us and up a path. You try it he said. I took off my skirt and blouse. It was wonderful, jumping through the air with a huge splash. Duane dove in the water and we swam with the horse up and down the clear, deep creek. We caught three hundred pounds of shrimp with a net across this creek he told me. We got out of the creek and drank rum and beer. Bobby Pindar came down and said we got to have the wedding before we eat. Duane said he’s looking at your tits and ass so I put my clothes on. They had a license. What if I’m already married? I teased, but that only stopped them for a moment until I shook my head no. I am the full-fledged captain of a boat I marry you said Pindar. Duane took off his necklace and put it around my neck. Kiss her Duane you asshole Grace said. He kissed me. I never been married how do I know? Duane said, I only know about war and horses. We ate some shrimp and drank a lot. Duane went off to pee and Bobby said Duane had the record for the most time spent in combat, almost four years before they shipped him home as good as dead. He has a sack full of medals for you. It don’t look good for ole Duane he said. We ate shrimp and chicken and drank more, then went swimming again without the horse. I was drunker than he was and I asked what all was wrong. Kidneys liver pancreas stomach—he would have to be hooked to a machine at the VA hospital to stay alive. I’ll take care of you I said. It was nearly dark and Grace who was quite drunk yelled at us to start our honeymoon so we went to Duane’s trailer to please her. He poured us big glasses of rum, I know now to get rid of me. We clicked glasses. How’s it with you little sister? he said. Then I fell asleep or passed out with his arms around me and my face against his neck. Even in my sleep I could feel his arms around me. I’m with my lover and we’ll take the horse back to the country I thought. Doctors will make him better and we’ll live up in the cabin in Buffalo Gap with the horse. On the way we’ll stop at the Missouri River, then the Niobrara, and let the horse swim, and we’ll dam the small spring in Buffalo Gap and let the horse swim there. In the middle of the night there was a loud banging and a flashlight in my face. It was Bobby yelling that Duane and the buckskin were gone. He dragged me to the boat. Another fisherman called and said he saw Duane and the horse swimming out Bow Channel past Logger-head Key toward open water in the dark and when he pulled alongside Duane pointed a gun at him. Bobby took the boat out the creek and into the channel. These same stars wavered and I rinsed my face and shivered. At a buoy we met the other fisherman who had called the Coast Guard. I heard the man whisper that he followed Duane and the horse at a distance out toward American Shoals and the Gulf Stream. He heard two shots and guessed that the first was for the horse and the second was for Duane. Bobby started to cry, then stopped, and both boats steered toward the oncoming lights of the Coast Guard launch. I looked up at the stars which had never seemed so huge. I sat on my father’s lap in a blanket to watch the shooting stars. Naomi said there is the archer the crow and whale and lion shining in the black sky. Should I have been with Duane plunging in these waves that make the stars waver and sway, over the phosphorescent crests and down through troughs and up again? The three boats searched all night but we never found the horse or Duane. The Coast Guard said sharks and blood. I was not well after that and Uncle Paul came from Arizona to get me. Months later, in October, with the permission of Naomi and Ruth who saw no harm, I buried an empty coffin like my father’s in our cemetery in the middle of the lilac grove.